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Product Support
Is This Platform A WIP? Should I Come Back In 6 Months?

I'm a little bit stumped and bewildered right now. And looking through the questions being asked there is a massive elephant in the room (or at least there is as far as I'm concerned).

I came to Moz because I was highly recommended to, and after doing my own research I was happy that it's a credible platform and one that is going to give me tangible data that i can use to improve my websites.

My issue is that the keyword tracker in Moz isn't even close to my GA account. To the point that Moz says I only have 6 keywords in the top 50 and 0 organic traffic last month. This is in contradiction to what my GA account says, the same GA account that is linked to MOZ.

If the keyword tracker is not correct, how can I have confidence in any other part of the application?

I actually think I made the right decision to use Moz, but I'm getting the feeling my timing might be off. For people that have been using Moz for a while, and have built successful websites on the back of the data they have provided, you may be willing to wait and give it some time. But I only joined recently, and I get the impression that the platform is in a bit of transitional period.

I asked previous questions to support about the variation in results provided by Moz and GA, and noticed that several others have been asking similar questions, with no real conclusive answers forthcoming. The only answer to my question was by another user who said that it was 'the norm'. Maybe I'm missing something. Please explain if I am, but for me GA is god.

If, as I suspect, and has been suggested, it is the transition from PRO to Analytics is throwing everything out of orbit a bit, but why should I hang around now? I could save my money and come back in 6 months or so when the R&D is over? As I have no serious amount of historical data stored in Moz.

I'm actually not looking for reasons to leave, I'm looking for reasons to stay, as I can see the huge potential of the application, but I am struggling to see those reason at the moment. If the data is incorrect its unusable, and the monthly fee is significant. SEMRush seems to have quite good reviews, but doesn't appear as authoritative as Moz.

My last posts on the subject have remained unanswered by support, I know their has just been a serious SE update which has probably preoccupied everyone, but... that's not my problem, sorry.

I know this turned into half a whinge, and I didn't want it to, I really want a solution, so I don't have to spend a day moving my accounts to another service provider.

First, with regard to the data discrepancies you are seeing in GA data, my first guess is that you might be looking at different timeframes in GA than we are showing in Moz Analytics (which currently shows weekly data). Our weekly report is showing the previous week’s data, and GA defaults to a different timeframe. If this is not the case, please let me know and I’ll see if I can help troubleshoot. Data accuracy is really critical to us and if things are off, there are few higher priorities.

Also, with regard to rankings, it usually takes a week before you see data. I've seen some people confused by rankings showing as ‘—‘ which means we haven’t retrieved rankings for that keyword yet. We’ll be putting in a more descriptive description for rankings that were not yet retrieved. This may not be the issue in your case – happy to discuss further.

As for whether Moz Analytics is a work in progress, I guess my answer would be yes. From a technical perspective, there are some scaling issues we are dealing with on the backend right now that our engineering team is literally working on day and night. This has caused some availability issues for some folks over the last couple of weeks. There will still be more issues over the coming weeks, but these should become very rare.

With regard to the feature set, that is definitely a work in progress, though Moz Analytics has a lot of advancements over our previous platform. We have a team dedicated to making constant additions and improvements to the platform. We will be publishing a page that will surface our top priorities so customers can see what is in the works.

Some of the things that are worth a checking out in Moz Analytics include:

Dashboards to see progress across search and other inbound marketing activities. We have a top level dash to show traffic from all sources, as well as detailed dashboards to see search, social, brand, and link progress.

A more robust rankings section than PRO with better looks into your rankings and competitive rankings, as well as recommendations for keywords to pay attention to.

Site crawls and on-page analyses are great for finding problems worth addressing. These are very similar to the previous iterations of these features.

High-level analytics for Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, as well as visibility into the traffic that those channels are driving to your site and the most important interactions you are having through social channels.

A more robust links section that tracks progress over time and lets you drill into your link profile

A new mentions section that allows you to track blog/news mentions to your site, your competitors sites (a great source for content ideas), and keep tabs on topics being written in your industry.

Moz membership also includes access to a lot of useful tools, including:

First of all I would like to say thank you for taking a look at my issues, and then trying to address them in such a comprehensive manner.

I have dived back into my GA account and unfortunately, which ever time frame I choose, even selecting a custom time frame to coincide with the dates of the Moz scrape, I can't get the same numbers to match up.

On keywords, GA is showing about 70 keywords that my site ranks in the top 50 for, I have previously added most of these to moz as and when they appear in GA. However, I can't remember the exact date that I added them to Moz, so for the sake of clarity I will wait until Moz does one more scape before making a judgement.

I am keen to find a solution as the power of the Moz tool is obvious, I just wish it was accurate in my case, the knowledge base of the community is impressive.

I am open to the fact I have set something up wrong and actually Moz is doing it's job perfectly, but I notice a few other people have mentioned having similar issues, so it may be a good exercise to get to the bottom of it in my case, and add my errors (if it's me) it to the getting started instructions, to help others.

I can see your authority at Moz, and if you would like me to add you as a user on my GA account so you can have a fish around, I have no problem at all doing that.

Thanks, Ian! I certainly wouldn't rule out that there is a problem, and even if the data is "right" from our perspective, there is, at the least, a problem in the way we are presenting it that is making it confusing to reconcile.

If you truly don't mind me poking around, I'd be very interested to take a look and see if I can figure out where the discrepancies lie. We can take this thread offline if you'd like - my email is adam -at- moz.com.

I'd be happy to report back what we learn to this Q&A thread afterward.

Hi Adam, No worries I have added you to my GA with read & Analyse permissions, if you need more just say.

I appreciate your offer to go off line but I am more than happy to stay here, I hope other people find it useful.

I am not a computer programmer, but I do build websites from templates with plug-ins, and have been doing so for about 4 years, I use myself and sell some of these sites. I think I would describe my knowledge as adequate but far from a professional, I know a lot of other people both on and off line who do what I do. I think people will be able to relate to my level of expertise & have probably made similar mistakes setting up Moz, if I have of course....

I had a chance to dig in a bit last night. Here's what I found. I'll include some looks at data, but nothing that identifies your site or keywords.

With regard tot he Google Analytics traffic data, I looked to see if the traffic we were showing from organic search was at odds with what GA was showing. Looking at the GA traffic and channels reports the data seemed to line up with the Moz report, for the report dates of October 1st through October 7th. During this time your site didn't receive any organic search visits, though you did on the day before this period and the day after. I think this is why you are seeing organic visits for a larger timeframe, but for the specific week of our report, it is in line.

With regard to rankings, that is a trickier one. Moz presents snapshots of non-personalized search results which we retrieve once per week. These are a fair reflection of what someone would see if they had no relationship with you or your topic and are retrieved in a consistent way from week to week. This consistency allows for good benchmarking and tracking of progress. What you are seeing in GA is average position over a period of time, and that takes into account personalized results and other factors that might affect and individualized view of rankings.

I looked at your search terms for the day that we retrieved your rankings, and compared what I saw. There are definitely some differences for the few that line up, but for almost all keywords, the volume was very small (5 impressions). This means that if even one of those impressions was from a personalized result (perhaps even yourself) it might increase the position of your result and show a much higher average position than a random person viewing that search result might see. I think that you will see more accurate average results in GA when there is a higher volume of searches. Dr. Pete, on our staff, recently did a statistical analysis comparing results of retrieving search results from a few different sources that may shed more light on this. http://moz.com/blog/comparing-ranktracking-methods-browser-vs-crawler-vs-webmaster-tools

In short, I would say that GA (sourcing from webmaster tools) is providing a valid result, but through a different lens. I hope that makes sense. Here is a quick image to illustrate what I saw.

Oh, I saw one more thing that might be causing some confusion. In the SEO results (pulled into GA from Webmaster tools) it is reporting a number of clicks for some of the reported rankings. These are at odds with the organic traffic that Moz Analytics is reporting (1st paragraph above) and the numbers seem kind of suspect. I'm not sure what is up here, but something looks a little off.

Digging a little more, there may just be discrepancies between what GA reports and what Webmaster tools reports. We use the data from GA - the webmaster tools data that is pulled in is not currently available via their API. Google published something about this in their documentation:

"Why doesn't Webmaster Tools data match Google Analytics data?

Webmaster Tools data may differ from the data displayed in other tools, such as Google Analytics. Possible reasons for this include:

Webmaster Tools does some additional data processing—for example, to handle duplicate content and visits from robots—that may cause your stats to differ from stats listed in other sources. Some tools, such as Google Analytics, track traffic only from users who have enabled JavaScript in their browser.

Google Analytics tracks visits only to pages which include the correctly configured Analytics Javascript code. If pages on the site don't have the code, Analytics will not track visits to those pages. Visits to pages without the Analytics tracking code will, however, be tracked in Webmaster Tools if users reach them via search results or if Google crawls or otherwise discovers them.

Some tools define "keywords" differently. For example:

The Keywords page in Webmaster Tools displays the most significant words Google found on your site.

The Keywords tool in Google Adwords displays the total number of user queries for that keyword across the web.

Analytics uses the term "keywords" to describe both search engine queries and AdWords paid keywords.

The Webmaster Tools Search Queries page lists shows the total number of keyword search queries in which your page's listing was seen in search results, and this is a smaller number. Also, Webmaster Tools rounds search query data to one or two significant digits."

Okay, I've gone a little overboard here, but I hope this is helpful. It was fun to dig into your data and geek out for a while. It illuminated a few things for me about the experience provided between GA and Moz Analytics. I think there is a lot more we should do in Moz products to make things clearer.

Thanks for having such an in-depth dig around, you certainly did 'get your geek on' in a big way.

The site that I introduced to Moz was brand new at the time of setting up my Moz account, even now it's less than a couple of months old. I can almost certainly say that 90% of the traffic is development traffic, either me or the team. It's unfortunate actually that their was an outage for a prolonged period of time (nobody got fired over it, but he does walk with a limp now; and his legs are fine), we had a server collapse and the older higher revenue generating sites on it took priority over the new sites.

As I saw it in GA, the Moz update was from the 1st-7th, the outage was in the middle of that range, only two days had any traffic and they were at either end of the update period, 1st - 11 visits and 7th - 8 visits, its actually this that first alerted me that their could potentially be a discrepancy. As the Moz update returned a total visit count of 0. But I suppose when dealing with such low numbers it will come down to the exact time the update took place.

The other part I was getting head around was that GA is showing large number of keywords search terms that the site is showing up for in searches, but Moz has picked up only a few, but I can see how most of the impressions in GA will be as a result of personalised results and not true organic searches.

If you don't mind I will regurgitate your detailed explanation of the relationship between GA & WMT in the future, to either get a pay rise or laid at the upcoming Xmas party. But in seriousness is great knowledge.

Well I can't thank you enough for taking the time out to walk me through this, I truly appreciate it, and I have got an awful lot out of the exercise. I'm sure you had better things to do, but thank you for going the extra mile.

I will keep you posted on how things are going and I will leave your access to my GA intact so if you fancy checking back in the future please do so.

I owe you a beer if I ever make it America or likewise if you come to Bangkok.

Hey friend! Have fun exploring Q&A, but in order to ask your own
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